This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

The news was recently full of the discovery of the best-ever preserved woolly mammoth, which raised cloning hopes.CNN:

Researchers from the Northeast Federal University in Yakutsk found the 10,000-year-old female mammoth buried in ice on the Lyakhovsky Islands off the coast of northeast Russia.

Scientists say they poked the frozen creature with a pick and dark liquid blood flowed out.

"The fragments of muscle tissues, which we've found out of the body, have a natural red color of
fresh meat. The reason for such preservation is that the lower part of the body was underlying in pure ice," said Semyon Grigoriev, the head of the expedition and of the university's Mammoth Museum, in a statement on the university's website. ...

"We suppose that the mammoth fell into water or got bogged down in a swamp, could not free
herself and died. Due to this fact the lower part of the body, including the lower jaw, and tongue tissue, was preserved very well," he said.

Grigoriev called the
liquid blood "priceless material" for the university's joint project
with South Korean scientists who are hoping to clone a woolly mammoth,
which has been extinct for thousands of years.

The effort is being led by Russian researcher Sergey Zimov,with hopes to back the hypothesis that hunting, and not climate change, destroyed the wildlife. The aim of Pleistocene Park is to recreate the ancient taiga/tundra
grasslands that were widespread in the region during the last ice age.
The key concept is that animals, more than temperature, maintained that
ecosystem. This argument is the justification for rewilding Pleistocene Park's landscape with megafauna that was previously abundant in the area, as evidenced by the fossil record.

In 2012, Russian scientists cloned a long-extinct 30,000 year old plant. There are concerns about cloning Neanderthals (see my posts on this idea, here and here). John P. Rafferty wonders whether this is moral:

Ethically, however, there may be problems with cloning and reintroducing Pleistocene animals to modern times. From the perspective of natural selection, it could be said that natural forces selected against Pleistocene mammals, since they could not adapt to changing ecological and climatic conditions. Bringing these animals back from extinction essentially contravenes the intent of nature and raises a number of complex philosophical questions. Do long-extinct species gain anything from being brought back from the dead? Is it cruel to place these animals in ecosystems different from the ones they evolved in? Will some Pleistocene species outcompete and force some modern species into extinction? If this is so, and modern plants and animals take precedence, will we be forced to slaughter the very creatures we resurrected? What about our own Pleistocene antecedents? If we bring back the Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis), is it ethical to place them in zoos and preserves and charge the public admission to see them?

Opponents of cloning to revive extinct species argue that clones lack genetic diversity. Also, an animal that is not a member of the species raises the clone:

It has also been noted that a resurrected species, while being
genetically the same as previously living specimens, will not have the
same behaviour as its predecessors, since the first animal to be brought
back will be raised by parents of a different species (the foetus's
host), not the one that died out. It will therefore not be able to learn
the "culture" of its species.

What if Sergey Zimov is right, and animals make the environment, rather than the other way around? What happens to our environment when creatures which exist outside of their time are reintroduced? What if evolution is really a big biological and environmental clock,
and different species belong to different times? Is it right to twist
the hands of the biological clock, and force them backwards?

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.